All 11 entries tagged Bored

February 22, 2008

According to Wikipedia, in the discussion regarding the new McKay-Carter Intergalactic Gate Bridge, General Hank Landry states that the distance between the Pegasus and Milky Way galaxies is "three million light-years", suggesting that the series takes place in the Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy.

April 21, 2007

A friend of mine recently acquired the funds and the stock availability to get himself a Wii. He doesn’t have a wireless router, so we were discussing the practicalities of the wired option.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about; during the conversation he mentioned that, since you can’t turn it off-off, he unplugs it at night to save electricity. This is fair enough at the moment since he can’t get it online, so isn’t losing anything, but it got me thinking about how much power a Wii actually uses. I knew it has the smallest power requirement of the current generation, but how much is not a lot?

I couldn’t find any clues on the power supply or the box (it’s a nice box, so I kept it, ok?) but even if it said, it probably wouldn’t give me standby power.

So, a quick trip to eBay, and about £10 total, got me an electricity meter (similar in appearance and use to the timers that switch appliances on and off to let burglars know you’re on holiday); as I said in the title, I was bored…

So, I now know the power consumption for most of the mains-powered appliances in the house. So here’s a summary:

Wii (on) 18W

Wii (orange standby) 10W

Wii (red standby) 1-2W

TV (on) 60W (it was either 50, 60, or 70; I can’t remember which; I was expecting 100s, though…)

TV (standby) 1W

Kettle 2kW ish

Henry 300W ish

Sky+ (on) 25W

Sky+ (standby) 20W then drops to about 15W after a minute or so of not recording

Fridge-Freezer 0W most of the time, but I can’t remember if the compressor was 10s or 100s

So, there we are; it costs roughly 1p to boil the kettle, about £1 to leave the telly on standby for a year, and approximately 5p to play on the Wii for a whole day… asuming my maths is right; either way the Wii doesn’t use much power…

January 02, 2007

It’s always amused me that if you search for something on Google (kittens, for example) and then do the search again but exclude all pages containing the word “porn” (kittens -porn in this case) the given number of results will always go down; I’ve yet to find a word or phrase that’s so innocent it hasn’t had a single encounter with a reference to porn.

However, what’s confused me about the example I’m using is that kittens returns 12,800,000 pages*, kittens -porn returns 2,680,000 pages* (~10,000,000 fewer!), but kittens porn only returns 844,000 pages*. So either Google searches don’t quite work how I think they do, or 9 million pages keep appearing and disappearing in the time it takes me to search…

December 25, 2006

It’s been a little under 4 months since I started scheduling daily videos here, and I’m knackered; it’s surprisingly hard work, especially for someone who’s lazy…

So I’ve decided I’ve had enough; I’m bored with them and I’m going to stop. I’m still going to post videos that I’ve made (such as the USB Hub that can blow up the world), but it’s not going to be daily; apart from anything else, I’m guessing you’re as sick of them as I am…

However, as a final video post I thought I’d showcase some of the best.

Honourable Mention

I’m not going to post all 7 videos again, but GameTrailers.com’s Zelda Retrospective is fantastic, and if you enjoyed it I recommend you download the originals from their site; here’s a handy link to help…

My laptop isn't working, so I have nothing to do. There's no one here, so I have no one to talk to. There's a University 40th Anniversary Event between here and outside, so I have nowhere to go.
I can't go anywhere to do something, I have nothing to do if I stay here.
Ever had one of those days where you wish you'd just stayed in bed…